by Hiroaki Sato
The narrator, “a sleepless child,” begins with his dreams or half-dreams with descriptions of immediate relatives, including his sickly grandmother, then moves on to the wife of a daimyo prone to illness. That “remote relative” was a Christian convert, of the sixteen or seventeenth century, who left a diary, from which the narrator quotes amply, though in modern Japanese. The story then moves on to an ancestor even more remote, a nobleman of the declining years of the Heian Court, although the subject has to do with a woman who was not from his “exalted” class and in fact “had no relation to my genealogy to the very end.” Through the nobleman’s nightly visits one summer, her passion for him flares up even as his interest cools. Her attention turns to a childhood friend, a Buddhist trainee who sends her passionate letters. She elopes with him, abandons him, then goes to a nunnery. There she writes a tale of her life and sends it to the nobleman.
The final part of the story describes “an aunt of my grandmother,” a diplomat’s daughter married to an earl who, after his death, married a rich merchant “of lowly birth” and lived for a while on an island in the South Seas. After divorcing him, she returned to Japan, built a purely Japanese-style house on her large estate and lived there for the rest of her life, occasionally talking about her past. “The Forest” ends with the aunt, now old, taking a visitor to an overlook in her spacious garden with a view of the sea.
The visitor turned and gazed at the snow-white sky that gave a dazzling glimpse of itself as the upper part of an oak tree agitated in the wind swept away and receded. Pressed by an irritable anxiety he did not know the reason of, the visitor may have felt he was standing next to “death,” right next to the stillness like that of a top spinning for life, a stillness resembling death, as it were.
Mishima told Azuma the title of the story came from a phrase in one of Guy-Charles Cros’s poems, translated by Horiguchi Daigaku, explaining that he meant the title to “symbolize inner, supernatural longings.”36 The poem reads:
Refrains
The doctors were convinced they could save her,
but the young girl died this year;
she died just when all the woods are in bloom.
Who knows if there are not greener branches, elsewhere?
Yet those she left behind wept for the girl who was gone;
as for me, I prefer to weep for girls full of life,
those who will become women and bear children
and so quickly forget about birds, flowers, songs. . . .
The doctors were convinced they could save her,
but she must have better understood her true destiny.
She died just when all the woods are in bloom;
she knew other forests are greener, elsewhere.37
(Tr. Luke Bouvier)
Late in his life, Mishima said he no longer liked the story, because in this “Rilke-esque story, only the bad influence of Romanticism and the affectations like those of a prematurely old man stand out.”38 But he used it as the title story of his first book and, by the time of that judgment, in 1968, he had allowed it to be reprinted a number of times, including in the volume he wrote the afterword with the words just quoted.
There was one more important thing that Mishima carried forward from Hasuda Zenmei: a deep admiration for the deliberately anachronistic group of diehards known as the Shinpūren. Hasuda’s father could have easily been in the forces that readily crushed the revolt of these men, in 1886, and Hasuda had a schoolteacher who was a son of one of them. He discussed the diehards via the teacher in Bunka Bungei.39 Mishima surely read the article with great interest. We will look at the Shinpūren later.
How the Penname Came About
The penname Mishima Yukio was proposed during the editorial meeting of Bungei Bunka in July. The four men met in an inn near Shuzenji, on the Izu Peninsula, where the famous temple with that name is located. To go to Shuzenji from Tokyo, you first take the train on the Tōkaidō Line and go to Mishima , where you switch to a local line south. So the names Mishima and Yuki (“to go” or “bound to”) came naturally. Yuki, which also means “snow ,” was appropriate as well in view of the permanent snow adorning the top of Mt. Fuji, which you saw soaring northwest from the train window. The “o” of Yukio is a common suffix to male names, so the name Mishima Yukio , came into being, with the personal part of the name left in the Japanese syllabary hiragana.
When Shimizu ventured to bring up the subject of a penname with Mishima, the sixteen-year-old student asked, “Won’t Hiraoka Kimitake do, sir?” Shimizu, the thirty-eight-year-old teacher, explained that it would be best to debut in an “outside” magazine with a penname. Also, Japanese writers and poets, following ancient Chinese custom, habitually adopted pennames. After thinking on the suggested name for a while, Mishima came up with the Chinese characters for the personal part of the name. When Shimizu suggested that might be a bit heavy and offered instead, Mishima agreed.40 With his father, who vowed not to allow his son to dabble in literature, back in the household, the adoption of the penname probably relieved Mishima of certain anxieties.41
The War
Japan was rushing toward war with the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. In September, Mishima wrote an essay simply to note that Japan is a special country because it has maintained the ways of ancient deities, which is what the phrase he chose for the title of the essay says: Kamunagara no michi. His command of language is impressive, and his argument cogent, except for one thing: like many who made such an argument, Mishima did not address the fact that both “the principal idea” that is the raison d’être of the Japanese Nation, “sincerity,” makoto or sei, and the idea that forms “the patriotism unique to Japan,” “loyalty,” chū, came from Confucianism. What makes the essay Mishima-esque is that Mishima penned it after an elaborate treatise in exaltation of Raymond Radiguet.42
In October 1941, Kishi Nobusuke, who was promoting the idea of rebuilding Japan with “the defense industry at its core” since his return from Manchukuo, became Minister of Commerce and Industry in Tōjō’s “war cabinet.” In no time he issued an ordinance specifying “important industries,” which included organization of a “control association” for each of the twelve sectors, such as iron and steel, coal, automobiles, and exports and imports. In Kishi’s vision, a “total war” system had to be under the control of bureaucrats, not military officers. For that purpose, he ignored the bureaucratic protocol based on education and seniority and forced out key directors of his ministry to install handpicked “reform bureaucrats.”
On November 10, 1941, that is, four weeks before Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor, Mishima wrote to Azuma: “We appear to be going to war with America, but I think it’s too late now. Germany will soon run out of gas, and may conclude a peace treaty with England. I think it unlikely that I’ll be drafted as a soldier, but what will I do if I am? If anything, I wish there’d be an uproarious war, and it would end in about a year.”43
The overall assessment of the day was that Japan had driven itself into a corner with the United States—or the United States had driven Japan into a corner. Germany’s general offensive against Moscow that had started in October had stalled. The talk was that Russia’s famed General Winter had stopped the Germans. About the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 8 (Japan Time), the Soviet forces began to push back the German invaders from Moscow.
Mishima’s wish that the war, were it to occur, would be “uproarious” and short, like a bunch of soldiers jumping out of their trenches and rushing to the enemy line shouting war cries, succinctly, uncannily, conveys the sense of the day. Japan had bogged down in China. There was an oppressive desire for some way out. Striking at the United States, the country that was tightening its screws on Japan, might be one way, though the escalation could be fatal.44
Japan, in any case, could not hope to win a protracted war with the country; the navy’s strong opposition was no secret. Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who under duress planned the attack
on the US naval base in Hawaii, is known to have observed that, if he had to wage war with the United States, he would be able to create havoc, but only for one year.45
With his father reunited with the family, the situation changed again. Mishima wrote Azuma: “A joke maybe, but father calls me ‘a national saboteur.’ As he puts it, ‘You only write this or that about Murasaki [Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji], she does this and that, things like that, you’re pale-faced, you’re absorbed only in trashy fiction,’” because doing such things was “inappropriate for the present situation.”46
In March 1942, when the Japanese were drunk with the initial victories, Azusa “voluntarily” retired from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry as director-general of fisheries. (He had been expected to do so while in Osaka, before he attained director-generalship, but had managed to thwart the plan.) Then, “descending from heaven,” he was given the presidency of Japan Charcoal-for-Gas Company, Inc., one of the government-sponsored enterprises for “national policy” that began to be set up during the Depression of the preceding decades.
The April 1942 issue of Bunka Bungei carried Mishima’s poem “Imperial Declaration” (Taishō), which refers to the Shōwa Emperor’s Declaration of War on December 8, 1941—the day of the Japanese Navy’s assault on Pearl Harbor.47 It is written in classical language, in the ancient “long song” form, with classical epithets.
Our Sovereign Familiar with the Eight Corners,
The day He declared His Imperial Declaration,
All the birds ceased their sounds of crying;
All the grasses lost their ability to waver.
Heaven and earth, unable to damn their tears,
Fell silent, voiceless.
The Imperial Command, clear, melodious,
Overflowed, indeed brimmed,
In the Reed Plain, Fresh Rice-Stalk Country.
Just then, in the South Sea, on the head of the querulous country,
The tearful sword fell of the Country of High-Shining Sun’s Child.
Just then, a voice was released. From the sea the enemies had polluted,
Ocean deities, raging, racing, smote down the enemy seafarers,
Sank them off the seaweed-harvesting coast.
The victorious shouts now resound,
Our fortunes are ever more layered.
But my heart, part of my innards, I cannot help it,
Unable to raise a cry of joy, simply sheds tears.48
Odakane Jirō, who wrote a biography not just of Hasuda Zenmei but also a large one of the poet Itō Shizuo, thought that this piece was no more than Mishima’s attempt to “imitate and learn from” Itō—“imitate and learn from” having been a centuries-old Asian tradition of “imitation is the best form of paying respect.” One of the two Itō poems the biographer cited was “Imperial Declaration”—with the same title, dealing with the same subject as Mishima’s poem, and with the last line more or less the same—and the other, “Spring Snow (Haru no yuki),” that describes light snow on the ancient Mimihara Imperial Mausoleum with no birds calling. Hasuda had praised the former extravagantly in the February issue of Bungei Bunka and printed the latter in its March issue. Itō’s “Imperial Declaration” is short, and reads in full:
December 8, Sixteenth Year of Shōwa
What a day it was
Driven by the refreshing thought
We offered prayers toward the Imperial Palace in the distance
And all of us
—Who of us could have stopped our tears?49
There are indications that this “imitate-and-learn” form of flattery may not have particularly pleased the poet, as we will see in the next chapter.
On February 16, Mishima wrote Azuma and commented on the Fall of Singapore that had occurred the day before: “Singapore was a pointlessly fierce battle, I hear. To minimize the casualties on both sides, [Britain] should have raised a white flag earlier; it couldn’t have been their heart’s desire, even for Britain, to see many soldiers die every minute to save face for a single British general in the name of the honor of the entire British forces. A great many Japanese newspaper reporters also died; you can imagine what happened to the soldiers.”50
On August 26, Sadatarō died, at age seventy-nine. Late that night Mishima wrote a threnody for him, in classical language. Describing his grandfather’s “easeful sleep,” he wrote: “Ah, even that easeful sleep must have been something / he was unable to get for years.”
Fujiwara Ginjirō, chairman of Ōji Paper, presented the Hiraoka family with a “funeral gift” of ten thousand yen—an extravagant sum, as it was equal to Azusa’s annual salary that itself was sumptuous as befits someone who had “descended from heaven.” The reason for Fujiwara’s largesse lay in his profound sense of indebtedness to Sadatarō. When Sadatarō was administrator of the Karafuto Agency, he had helped Fujiwara build the first pulp factory in Japan. That led, in the end, to Fujiwara’s status as King of Paper Manufacturing, especially after Ōji Paper became a virtual monopoly, in 1933, as a result of mergers promoted by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. Three years earlier, in fact, he had built an outsize bronze statue of Sadatarō in the Karafuto Shrine, in Toyohara City (today’s Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk) with the pretext of commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Japan’s possession of the southern half of Sakhalin and unveiled it on August 22. Mishima, then five, attended the ceremony with Sadatarō, Natsuko, and Shizue. In an interview on the occasion, Sadatarō said he had a two-pronged idea for the development of Karafuto: pulp and medicinal herbs.51
This family connection would come in handy when the idea of publishing The Forest in Full Bloom in book form arose in the last phase of the war when paper shortages, like that of many other things, had become an acute problem.
With Azuma as his intense literary correspondent, Mishima’s relationship with Bōjō seems to have suffered. In early 1943, he gave Azuma a rather cool assessment of his other literary senior: “It appears Bōjōsan can never get out of Shiga [Naoya], Akutagawa [Ryūnosuke], [Villiers de] l’Isle-Adam.”52 Yet this did not mean Mishima had come to reject Bōjō as unworthy. In January 1944, he listed, as he at times did, his aphoristic judgments on some of the things he saw around him—apparently not for publication, because he wrote “I loathe the present age in which Nazism is triumphant”—and there he wrote: “Mr. Bōjō Toshitami’s literature is still unknown to society and not accepted by people, but I do not doubt it will prove to be an astonishment when the eyes of those in the know with unfaked, true concern for the nation are liberated in postwar Japan.”53 The word he chose for “concern for the nation” was yūkoku.
And, a few years after the war, Mishima wrote that Bōjō “loved the dark, sensuous sorrow of French Symbolist poetry and was a passionate idolater of Comte de l’Isle-Adam” while at the same time “a devout convert to every formation of beauty of [Japan’s] court period with The Tale of Genji as its symbol.” He wrote this when asked for an afterword to Bōjō’s collection of short stories, saying he was indebted to Bōjō for “the awakening of my initial artistic impulse.”54
Then the relationship of the two faded and disappeared, until it revived unexpectedly toward the end of Mishima’s life because of Bōjō’s intimate knowledge of Japan’s aristocratic society as it had existed before Japan’s defeat in the war.
In July 1942, the first issue of Akae came out. The third member of the group, Tokugawa Yoshiyasu, was a recent graduate of the Peers School and now an art student at the Imperial University of Tokyo. As the name suggests, he was related, albeit through adoptions, to the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Ieyasu. He did the cover design and illustrations. He also designed the cover of Mishima’s first book. It was in his letter to Tokugawa, in September 1943, that Mishima fulminated against the government’s imposition of “a kokumin ceremonial” on the people.
“The other day I went to the New Japan Symphony Orchestra,” he wrote. “All they had to do was simply to ask us to pray for t
he brave soldiers who have perished in battle, but through a loudspeaker they started mouthing homilies such as ‘displaying the pledge of the 100 million as a single heart for the completion of the Holy War,’ so I felt a bit of chill, when there was the command, ‘Pray.’ At once the orchestra performed ‘When Seagoing.’”
“It was the same as a play riding the tides of the day at some playhouse in some alley in Asakusa or thereabouts,” Mishima continued. Asakusa traditionally has been an area where “commoners,” in the parlance of Mishima’s days, or regular folks gather to enjoy themselves. In other words, what was done to the performance of a highbrow symphony orchestra was to bring it down to the vulgar level of commoners’ taste. “It was awful in its sacrilege, and I was furious.”55
The number “100 million” represented the round total of the Japanese, which at the time included peoples of Korea and Taiwan. “When Seagoing,” Umi yukaba, is an ancient military vow incorporated into one of Ōtomo no Yakamochi’s “long songs” in the Man’yōshū, the oldest extant anthology of Japanese poetry. It reads in its entirety:
When seagoing, we might become watery corpses,
mountain-going, corpses for grasses to grow from.
Our wish is to die by our Sovereign’s side
with no looking back
Nobutoki Kiyoshi, a composer influenced by German Romanticism, composed the music in 1937. The song was soon adopted as a “semi-national anthem.” In time it came to be broadcast before any announcement of an annihilative defeat of a Japanese military unit, gyokusai.
Tokugawa died a few years after the war, at age twenty-eight. Mishima did not think much of him as an artist or a writer, but a decade later he portrayed the young aristocrat in “The Nobility” (Kiken). He wrote it à la Walter Pater’s short stories such as “Sebastian Van Storck” and “Duke Carl Of Rosenmold,” he explained.56